C208 – Santiago to Chitré, Panamá

I was redoing a saved flight, in fact just the final approach to Santiago, Veraguas, Panamá. In other words the Ruben Cantú airport (ICAO: MPSA) for which I had made an add-on scenery. It was a final approach at dusk to runway 35 and after a successful landing I stayed at the apron for a while watching the sunset and as you can see it was already dark. Departure time 18:32 local, 23:32 UTC.
It looked beautiful and I noticed I had already a preloaded flight plan MPSA-PX06. A flight to the Alonso Valderrama airport in Chitré, Herrera, Panama (ICAO: MPCE, FSX: PX06).  These are the two most important airfields in the central provinces to this date. It looked so nice that I thought it would be a good IFR challenge (no big mountains though) to navigate this by instrument with low visibility (night conditions), so I turned on my laptop for the communications and IvAp client. No charts for any of these two in Panama, so basically you have to grab your aeronautical map and cook your own combination of beacons and radials to do your own navigation.
Flight Briefing & Off we go!
But I digress… while at the apron near the hangar a couple of businessmen looking for cattle in Santiago had a bad turn in their negotiation and decided to head to Chitré as soon as possible so your virtual servant was hired to transport them to Chitré. Luckily both Santiago (MPSA) and Chitré (MPCE) airports have night lighting (Note: both FSX airports are outdated and without lights).
For this I filed an IFR flight plan. This would be short 30 minute flight at 5000’. The flight plan was direct to DEXAN intersection right on Chitré airport (FSX: PX06). From Santiago’s STG VOR to Chitré’s DEXAN intersection we go over victor airway V13 heading 103 degrees.
We will depart from Santiago’s runway 17 and turn left to intercept R-103 outbound STG VOR (114.50) and it would be some 32 nm to reach DEXAN which is right at the airport. When we are nearby we should see the salt-mining lots of Boca de Parita (see screenshot on the left) on our left side. Then we will continue on this heading for our crosswind leg for about 3nm.
Later we will turn left again heading 012 degrees for our downwind leg (about 5-8nm). In this leg we will have our senses heightened as we are heading into the sea, the Parita Bay to be more precise. You don’t want to accompany the sharks due to night disorientation (remember Kennedy!).
OK, by now we are on our downwind leg and the two businessmen are excited now that they see the airport vaguely on our left. However, they do become nervous when they notice we are going to be flying over water. By the way, the virtual pilot cannot swim.
As you can see my virtual cockpit was fully setup from the beginning. Although the altitude here is showing 2500 ft. for our downwind leg. I had the STG VOR (114.50) on NAV1 with OBS1 set to R-103 (outbound STG). I had also as reference TBG VOR/DME (110.0) set on NAV2 with OBS2 set to R-286. Basically, assuming we kept our set outbound course off STG VOR, we had the drawback that STG has no DME (yeah, flying in Panama is compared to bush flying for what I hear). So, I figured with TBG tuned in and on that radial I should see around 71 nm on the DME (TBG) when I was right over DEXAN. (I didn’t want to use the GPS).
I had also set the Chitre NDB (CHE 440.00) on the ADF, that would point us to the airport in the dark. Out in the lonely see and before it got even more scary, we turned left again for our base leg. Make sure you don’t lose altitude or get disoriented, watch the artificial horizon and in particular the ADF needle, it points right at the airport!.
At the right moment depending on your speed, you would turn left again for the final leg into runway 19 (heading 190). Perhaps if you zoom into the picture on the left you would notice the Chitré airport night lighting right above the airspeed indicator. Look well because the lights are not very intense! The approach has to be done carefully because if you descend too much you will ditch on the sea, if not you should fly over El Agallito beach, over the high vegetation and then land. I was very pleased to have done a good landing at night on this Cessna 208 Grand Caravan (ICAO: C208) in night conditions and watching my instruments rather than visually  and relying on the GPS only to verify I was at the right place. Unfortunately there was a problem with my IvAp connection and I was not able to report the flight online with my virtual airline (Virtual Pilots Association).